墨西哥城 - ​​费尔南达·梅尔乔（Fernanda Melchor）的墨西哥没有童话故事的地方：年轻女孩被强奸并抛在一边，青春期的男孩变成刺客，并为纳尔科维他的磨坊做了磨碎。她小说的黑社会几乎没有舒适和更少的机会，一个想象中的景观（对于某些现实来说）可能更容易被隔离而忽略。

But for Melchor, to follow any voice other than the one inside her head — the one telling her to delve still deeper into the dark side of human nature — would be “a suicide.”

“Am I afraid that people will think that Trump is right reading my novels? Sometimes,” Melchor said on a video call from Berlin, where she’s on a yearlong fellowship, referring to the former U.S. president’s negative comments about Mexicans. “But I can’t change the way I write just because I’m afraid of what people are going to say.”

Melchor, 39, has quickly become one of the most celebrated new voices in Latin American literature. Two of her four books have been translated into English, and both were noted by the International Booker Prize: In 2020, she was shortlisted for “Hurricane Season,” and in 2022, she made the long list with her latest novel, “Paradais,” which will be released in the United States this week.

But while her writing turns an unsparing eye on the dysfunction and violence of her native Veracruz, Melchor makes clear that it is neither her job nor her intention to explain her homeland. Her novels are less portraits of Mexico than they are literary MRIs, probing unseen corners of the human heart and finding that many of its darker shades are universal.

她说：“暴力一直是我的谜。”“为什么会发生，如何发生，看起来我们都有能力……我一直都对这一切着迷。”

The descent of two young men into senseless violence is central to “Paradais.” The story follows Franco and Polo, two teenagers who meet up in the evenings in the gated community where Franco lives to drink and smoke themselves to oblivion.

马球在附近担任园丁，并在很大程度上忍受了佛朗哥关于“拧”邻居和“让她”的狂欢。他满足于海绵酒和香烟，并由富裕的男孩支付，同时逃脱了他在家中的创伤。梅尔乔（Melchor）的叙述者表达了波罗（Polo）的想法，但已经超越了他作为佛朗哥（Franco）勉强的同伙的选择。

As with her previous work, societal and personal mysteries unfold in long, rhythmic compositions. In “Hurricane Season,” these are centered on the enigmatic life and death of a local healer known as “the Witch.” In “Paradais,” they come first in the shape of an inevitable crime. Then Polo’s self-deceptions are slowly revealed for what they are.

“Her books are about murders and rapes and porn addicts and the systemic abuse of women by men. And in the same breath, they are about neglected little boys, emotional privation and lives bereft of love,” said Sophie Hughes, who translated both “Paradais” and “Hurricane Season” into English. “She writes about horror with humanity, with grace.”

The origin of Melchor’s need to see what’s hiding in the shadows is unclear even to her, though it’s been part of her psyche since she can remember, she said. Among the first books she bought with her own money, at around 13 years old, were stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Patrick Süskind’s “Perfume” and Thomas Harris’ “Silence of the Lambs.” The tales, she said, were “not about the victims but about the killers, so I think I’ve always been attracted or intrigued by what makes people do stuff like that.”

后来，作为一名学生和记者，梅尔乔（Melchor）仍然被墨西哥充满活力的腹部的故事所吸引。在“AquíNono Es Miami”（这不是迈阿密）中，她的叙述性非小说的汇编于2013年首次以西班牙语出版，并于2023年在英语中发表，其中包括她在Oaxaca-Veracruz上私刑的盗窃案的说法边界。她回想起小时候就了解了此案，“看到一个男人在电视上燃烧，需要知道发生了什么。”

Melchor wrote her first draft of “Paradais” while part of the writers’ room on “Somos,” a fictionalized Netflix account of a 2011 massacre in northern Mexico perpetrated by the Zetas cartel. For six weeks, she would work on the series during the day, “making sure that everything was believable in Mexican terms.” Her nights were spent in a hotel room, working on the book while dealing with “a rough spot” in her personal life: the end of a long relationship that left her feeling “cast out” of home and family.

她说：“我的书是我灵魂的肖像。”“当然，这对我说得不好。就是这样。”

“ Paradais”可能不打算作为有关墨西哥社会的公开声明，但是很难找到关于其经常令人困扰的生活事实的更敏锐的评论。梅尔乔（Melchor）小说中的男人将女性视为骗子和欺骗者，拥有药水和力量，使她们失去控制并转向极端。Polo’s grandfather warns him that it’s “bad for a man’s health — pernicious he would say — to sleep so close to a woman,” and Polo himself looks down on Franco for not having “the balls to approach any member of the opposite sex and do what it took to tame her, control her, spread her legs.”

正如她在“飓风季节”中所写的那样，梅尔乔（Melchor）清楚地描绘了“男性副主义的全部残酷力量”，在当今的墨西哥尤其令人发指。妇女和年轻妇女的失踪是在几乎每天的早晨新闻，即使一场大型而充满活力的妇女抗议运动也迫使凌乱而不平衡地估计性别暴力。

“When I wrote ‘Hurricane Season,’ I was very interested in making sense of the horrible violence that we experience in Mexico,” she said, “and also of the violence that I’ve been subjected to as a woman, and as a woman in Veracruz.”

But while Melchor doesn’t shy away from the broader conversation about the risks inherent to being a woman in the country of her birth, she also finds it intriguing that readers assume she is inspired by that reality and never, for example, by American writers like Denis Johnson, Cormac McCarthy or Lee Stringer.

“Poverty and homelessness and drug addiction are not specific to one country,” she said.

As for what’s next, Melchor is superstitious about giving away too much. “Hurricane Season” is set to be made into a film, produced by Netflix and directed by Elisa Miller, and two ideas for potential books are in the works.

梅尔乔说：“我仍然对写书的书籍非常感兴趣。”“我相信艺术必须总是留下伤口，但是我正在向其他读者伤口的方式转移，而不是完全带有暴力，而是从人类情感的调色板中带有其他一些颜色。”